THE ANC Women’s League has fingered the usual suspects behind the bare-bummed protest, if we may put it that way, at the ruling party’s Tshwane offices earlier this week.
“The demonstration was in bad taste,” the league said on Wednesday, “and displays a moral decay that emanates from foreign tendencies within the ANC such as factionalism and clique politics.”
Here at the Mahogany Ridge we’d seen the photographs and had to conclude that, whoever was responsible for them and whatever the provenance, the display by these women of their moral decay was quite alarming – and perhaps counterproductive, given the league’s frothy about “unethical acts of indecent exposure” and their urging women to “always carry themselves in an exemplary manner”.
Marx was most instructive on the matter: “Somebody once said it’s what you don’t see you’re interested in, and this is true.” That’s Groucho, by the way, not the other Marx.
But, for all their displeasure at such behaviour, the league must concede that in recent years the naked backside has come to feature prominently in our public life.
And they are right about the foreign tendencies. Like all good things – or bad, depending on your education and politics – this manner of showing disapproval and insulting one’s opponents was a colonial practice, and a very old one at that.